English 255 - WHAT MAKES TALE WORTH TELLING?
Spring
2014
01
4.00
Michael Gorra
MW 01:10-02:30
Smith College
40407-S14
SEELYE 310
mgorra@smith.edu
40374
Same as CLT 255.
How did the modern short story emerge - why, where, when? What is its relation to other forms of short fiction - the Italian novella or the German novelle, or the fairy tale? Why are they often so elaborately framed, with their kernel presented as a kind of oral performance: a story told by one character to another? Why do they so often rely on the fantastic and the unlikely - and how, by the end of the century, did the story come to concentrate instead on the mundane and the ordinary? What, in short, makes a tale worth telling? Readings in Goethe, Hoffman, Hawthorne, Gogol, Turgenev, Maupassant, Verga, Kipling, Chekhov, Jewett, and others.
How did the modern short story emerge - why, where, when? What is its relation to other forms of short fiction - the Italian novella or the German novelle, or the fairy tale? Why are they often so elaborately framed, with their kernel presented as a kind of oral performance: a story told by one character to another? Why do they so often rely on the fantastic and the unlikely - and how, by the end of the century, did the story come to concentrate instead on the mundane and the ordinary? What, in short, makes a tale worth telling? Readings in Goethe, Hoffman, Hawthorne, Gogol, Turgenev, Maupassant, Verga, Kipling, Chekhov, Jewett, and others.